Participatory Practice
Putting it all together: reframing our view of the world to change our practice
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Our cultural narrative shapes our individual experience of how we perceive and explain what is out there. Becoming more aware of this process is the first step towards what Einstein referred to as the new way of thinking that might help us to resolve the ‘problems’ created by the narrative of separation (the way of thinking that created these problems in the first place). I believe that the narrative of interbeing and participatory whole systems thinking will help us to transform and/or resolve many of these problems. (Wahl, 2016: 103) It will now also have become apparent to you that there is strong similarity between indigenous and many non-Western ways of knowing and the ideas that have developed in Deep Ecology. Ecological and ecosystem thinking looks at the relationships between phenomena rather than the parts. Restoring health, for example, is not about fixing a specific body part but about restoring the balance between the physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and social dimensions of a person’s life. The ecological paradigm fits with the notion, previously referred to, that the mind is not separate from the world; rather, that reality is always in subjective– objective relation. Thus, cognition is not a representation of an independently existing world, but a continual bringing forth of the world through the process of living (Maturana and Varela, 1987). As Gregory Bateson (1979) argues, we need to move our focus from seeing ‘things’ to seeing patterns, we are part of any field we study and, to understand the field, we must also reflect on ourselves as part of that world, what Capra (1996) calls the ‘web of life’. As participants in that living system, we need to cultivate the art of appropriate participation. The ideas presented in this chapter are at their heart very simple. Everything is connected. However, we have conveyed those ideas largely through a propositional approach whereas, if we are true to the philosophy, you can only really engage with the ideas through a process of coming to know with all your experience – emotional, practical as well as cognitive. We urge you to explore other modes of knowledge creation to explore these ideas, such as poetry, art and human sculpture.
Challenge yourself: 1. Spend some time in nature without any technology, and experience how you feel before, during and after? Find a way to express those feelings through any medium you choose: art, sculpture, music …
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